I was walking into one of my jobs the other day and I heard someone calling my name. It was the office assistant upfront, whom I had spoken to a few days earlier about some random subject. I gave him my business card before, but I didn't think much of it.

"Hey, I downloaded your game Angel, um, something, er.."

"Oh, you mean Angel Hair," I said, seeing that he was struggling.

"Yeah. I'm going to check it out later today. I was looking at the other stuff that you're working on, too. I'll have to get it when you're done."

"Great, I'm trying to get back into making time to program, but I should have some new stuff up in a couple of months."

"Cool."

In those ten seconds I went from not thinking about any games (and thinking about paying my bills) to planning my next gaming venture. I realized that no matter how dedicated anyone is to game development, each of us needs positive reinforcement and feedback, even if from a complete stranger.

Unfortunately, game development encouragement and support can be parallel to honesty during someone's life: the truth and love don't come out until the funeral. It's not unusual to see virtual epitaphs and memorials for dead projects, most likely lined with appropriate sympathy and sadness:

"This project was going to be AWESOME, definitely parallel to the classic RPGs (Final Fantasy, Ultima, so on). It stopped a month into development, though, and the designer is nowhere to be found. Who knows what might have been..."

I, for one, agree with outspokenness and encouragement among designers who empathize with a dead project. What is not good, however, is the lack of support while the project is still alive. Developers need encouragement the most while they are staying up all night programming, spending what^Òs left of their small budget on development tools, or responding to an email flame, not when they have given up on a project and moved on.

Like addressed in some of my other columns, most recently The Balloon Popper, there needs to be a dependable support network between all independent game developers, mostly because we are so unique. There are few other fields where the creator is physically disconnected from the intended audience, meaning that my software has been downloaded by a guy in Poland, a lady in Australia, and an office assistant in America. The only reason I know that a Pollock and an Australian played my game is because of the feedback I received.

And now, because of some random encounter with a local office assistant, I feel that much more motivated to design and to program. As many of you know, there is nothing quite like the feeling of someone being interested in your software. It's almost like the user is saying "I'm listening."

The best thing we can do is listen to each other.

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Written by Damon Brown.